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Had McNamara listened too closely to Democratic oratory about U.S. defenses during the campaign, he might have expected to take over a department comparable in style, power and esprit to the Union forces at First Bull Run. But he knew better. Working side by side with Tom Gates for a month before inauguration, he came to comprehend the vastness of the 2,500,000-man U.S. armed forces soon to be at his command. They are second to none, and far and away the most powerful force in the history of warfare. U.S. Air Force bombers prowl the skies on day and night alert throughout the world. The Navy's fleets and task forces have effective control of all the earth's major bodies of water, with missiles below and nuclear bombers overhead. Aboard ships and strung across Pacific outposts are the ready Marines, many of them veterans of Korean fighting and of crisis moves in Quemoy and Lebanon. The crack Seventh Army, massed 150,000 strong in Europe, keeps a cool watch on Berlin and provides the shield for NATO; the Korea-trained 82nd Airborne Division is at Fort Bragg, N.C., ready for the next call.
In lonely stations in the Arctic and tropics, men grow eyesore in their never-ending study of radarscopes. In the far Pacific, men from Navy patrols check in on the trust territory islands of Agrihan, Pagan, Aquijan, Sarigan. In the Mediterranean, while Russian "trawlers" trail the Sixth Fleet like beggars, sailors call at Tobruk to deliver and dedicate playground equipment for Libyan children. In a tightly guarded basement room at SAC headquarters in Omaha, hand-picked intelligence officers feed information on weather, geography, fuel and aerodynamics into beady-eyed monster machines that crank out 16 million computations, and then read the results into the ready ICBMs that form part of the U.S. retaliatory force.
The Stimulator. To all this, and to the momentous question marks of the cold war. Bob McNamara has brought a penetrating mind and bottomless vigor. Says he: "I see my position as being that of a leader, not a judge. I'm here to originate, to stimulate new ideas and programs, and not just to adjudicate arguments. You've got to do things differently or else you're not improving them." Up at 6 a.m., and in the office at 7:10 six days a week, he puts in chock-full twelve-hour days, moves fast.
Skipping the traditional oral intelligence briefings that come packaged with map board, pointer and colonel attached, he demands tightly written papers that he can scan with his built-in, wide-screen-camera mind. Answers to hard questions are demanded with computer speed. The Pentagon's "action officers" now act; "project officers" project. Says a staffer: "I've never been so flattened out since law school. Among other things, he's piling on the work to find out who can produce; if you can't, you're out." And McNamara keeps a special task force at work scouting good new men to replace the outs.